Neuroimaging Demonstrates How a Mother's Brain Responds to Her Infant

In humans, the distinctive ability of mothers to recognize and respond to the smiles and cries of their babies plays an important role in the psychologic, cognitive, and social development of these infants. Scientists have had a very limited understanding of how the maternal brain accomplishes these amazing feats, but a new study now provides some new clues in to the mechanisms underlying the process.


In the study, published in the February 15, 2008, issue of the journal Biological Psychiatry, Dr. Madoka Noriuchi and colleagues from the Graduate School of Tokyo Metropolitan University (Japan) used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a tool that enables scientists to study the function of brain circuits in people, to examine patterns of maternal brain activation. The researchers asked healthy mothers to view video clips, which showed either their own infant (approximate age of 16 months) or an unknown infant in two emotional conditions either happy or upset/crying.

Dr. Madoka Noriuchi, senior author of the study, explained their findings, "We found that a limited number of mother's brain areas were specifically related to maternal love, and the specific pattern of mother's response was observed for her infant's attachment behaviors evoking mother's care-taking behaviors for vigilant protectiveness.”

They discovered that particular circuits in the brain, involving several regions in the cerebral cortex and limbic system, are distinctively activated when mothers distinguish the smiles and cries of their own infants from those of other infants. The investigators also found that a mother responds more strongly to the crying than the smiling of her own infant, which, according to the authors, seems, "to be biologically meaningful in terms of adaptation to specific demands associated with successful infant care.”

John H. Krystal, M.D., editor of the Biological Psychiatry and affiliated with Yale University School of Medicine (New Haven, CT, USA), discussed the importance of this study, "this type of knowledge provides the beginnings of a scientific understanding of human maternal behavior. This knowledge could be helpful some day in developing treatments for the many problems and diseases that may adversely affect the mother-infant relationship.”


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